With so many units locked in at below market rents due to rent control, it doesn’t take much to swing the dynamics back to the landlords favor. 

Auto and gas purchases often swing up and down and can mask underlying trends in retail sales.

Houston has the greatest potential for gains but you'll need to get on site to understand the neighborhoods and the swings in property values.

Using a cap rate or a gross income multiplier leads to valuations that are crazy outrageous and just cannot be accurate in a market where real estate trades around a 3-6 cap, and a 166 - 200X monthly GIM. 

We have a guy who will be handling most of the renovations and a few of the trades will be hired out.

All the SEO strategies and tricks of the trade won't mean jack if your content isn't legitimately better than any other alternative that visitors could find.

Non-publicly traded REITs vs publicly traded REITs.

Its a trade organization that has established and published standards for basement repairs.

I do work on the operational side for publicly traded companies, but plenty of good securities attorneys available in DFW as well.

Most investors who scale end up with some combination of all of it (hold some, flip some, refinance some, trade up to larger properties).